Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [9]
LESS THAN two hundred years after the arrival of Saint Mark’s body consecrated Venice, the Republic was well on its way to conquering the Adriatic and surrounding regions.
Venetian fleets became adept at engaging would-be invaders, such as the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard, whose armada threatened to obstruct Venetian access to the Mediterranean. In a fierce engagement with Guiscard’s vessels in the Adriatic, off the west Albanian city of Durazzo, Venetian ships, prevented from entering the harbor, were grappled together to form a floating island blocking the entrance. When enemy craft approached, the Venetian sailors, poised in boats suspended from their floating “island,” thrust primitive torpedoes in the form of logs at the oncoming ships, sinking or badly damaging them. Nevertheless, the Normans eventually claimed Durazzo, even as Venetian merchants and battleships roamed the Mediterranean in search of profit. In perhaps no other city-state did the exercise of commerce approach the practice of war as it did in Venice, where the two became virtually synonymous. The Republic existed amid an almost continual state of warfare, sometimes in the form of a distant guerrilla struggle, sometimes in a cold war designed to rebuff rivals, and sometimes in furious battles against determined enemies. Venice did not always win, but the city’s soldiers and sailors were expected to fight for their commercial enterprises.
No other city-state equaled Venice’s skill and daring on the sea. If the Republic was celebrated for its merchants, it was equally feared for its ruthless naval warriors. In time, Marco Polo would have a chance to play both roles, a trader in peacetime and as a commander in battle.
IN 1204, Venice celebrated a major victory: the capture of Constantinople, by combined European forces, at the height of the Fourth Crusade.
The triumph of Christianity was not a sure thing in Marco Polo’s day. The Church of Rome was fighting for its place in the world against an array of enemies—Islam, the Mongols, the Greek Orthodox Church, even itself. The Age of Faith was also an age of peril, turmoil, and war.
The Crusades began with a simple goal: to permit Christians to continue to make pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb in Jerusalem in which the body of the crucified Jesus was believed to be laid to rest. Pilgrims had been visiting this holiest of Christian shrines since at least the eighth century AD. Matters changed dramatically in 1009 when Hakim, the Fatimid caliph—that is, Muslim ruler—of Cairo, called for the Holy Sepulcher’s destruction. Afterward, unlucky Christians and Jews who found themselves in Jerusalem were likely to be persecuted, and the city’s Christian quarter was surrounded by a forbidding wall that controlled access. Within five years, thousands of churches had been burned or ransacked.
The violence only increased the desire of Christians to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Church undertook a series of Crusades, eventually eight in all, with the avowed goal of delivering places sacred to Christians from the Muslim oppressors. Conceived as religious wars against a suddenly ascendant Islam, the Crusades quickly deteriorated into a series of battles for political and military spoils. By the time of the brief Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), the Papacy was losing its grip on the endeavor, as secular leaders across Europe acquired ever more power and influence. Eventually, individual monarchs launched their own Crusades.
The original plan for the Fourth Crusade was simple enough: Pope Innocent III and the preacher Foulques of Neuilly-sur-Marne proposed to conquer the Muslim warriors. The Crusaders planned ultimately to take Jerusalem by way of Egypt, and they wanted the support of Venice.
VENETIANS, true to their commercial agenda, had maintained an arm’s-length relationship with the Crusades.